"You can think yourself lucky that I don't take out a summons against you," said the owner of the fox-terrier, hurrying off, without a word of thanks to the young man, to bathe Trusty's wounds at the nearest fountain. He was a dark young man with fine features and deep brown eyes, who spoke English with a French accent. "Pardon, Mademoiselle, we have not met before, have we?" he asked, looking hard at Mary. She thought that he was trying to improve the occasion and was on the point of replying with a cold negative, when she began to wonder where and how she had met this stranger before. In his frankly puzzled stare there was not a hint of presumption, and, though to enter into conversation with a young man who had rendered her a service in a public park was contrary to the whole spirit of her bringing up, Mary could not resist her curiosity. "Have we met before?" she asked. "I've a feeling that we have somewhere. You are French, are you not?" "From the Lyonnais," he replied. "But that's where I was at school." "I lived in Châteaublanc," he continued. In a flash she remembered who he was. "Pierre Menard!" she cried. "And you are the little English girl with--pardon, Mademoiselle--with red hair." When two old friends meet after a long lapse of time, the years between are either swept away altogether or their capacity for separation is doubled. In this case they were obliterated. Here on this fine morning in early March Pierre stood before Mary as many times he had stood in the fair landscapes of memory. She heard again the diminishing sound of the drum that played him on to glory down that winding road ten years ago; she stood again beside him in that embrasure, gazing at a world washed with the gold of that breathless and mellow autumn day; she saw him again in heroic guise and found in his handling of the dog-fight such an inspired chivalry as she had found in his setting forth to fight for France. "And how well you speak English, Monsieur." "I have lived in London for eight years. I'm working with Marechal et Cie, the big silk merchants. I had some business to transact in Kensington and took the opportunity of walking through the Gardens this beautiful day." "Then I must not detain you," she murmured. With a gesture he disposed of any urgency in his business. "You were in a greater hurry last time we were together," Mary reminded him. She blushed at the adverb she had used, for it seemed to sweep them toward an intimacy that she felt was imprudent. "I was not old enough last time, Mademoiselle, to appreciate my good fortune. And you were, if I may say so, a very little girl in those days, Mademoiselle."